PUNE: Startups in the skills space are not just helping blue-collar professionals enter the industry, but also helping companies reduce training costs.

Startups, such as Skillsonics, and LabourNet, are reducing costs for manufacturing companies in the large and medium industries by helping them pick trained blue-collar workers, who can hit the ground running. Also, with the National skill Development Corporation emphasising on skill training, this market is set to boom.

There is a high skill shortage across the manufacturing sector today and retention of employees is a further challenge. "The ITI curriculum in the country is not turning out industryready workers and manufacturing companies are unable to employ them on the shop floor quickly," said Gayatri Vasudevan, CEO of LabourNet Services. LabourNet has trained close to 16,000 workers for shop floor work in the manufacturing segment and around 30,000 workers in construction.

"We are also doing a lot of up skilling of workers who already have experience, but can improvise their skills especially with any new technology ," said Vasudevan, who pointed out that companies usually in cur a 30-40% increase in expenditure through cost of training, wast age and manpower. "We are able to cut down this cost significantly ." LabourNet was started in 2007, and has become a for-profit social enter prise since 2011. It re ceived total funding of Rs 35 crore, including an ` investment of Rs 25 crore from NSDC with a line of credit in the next few years besides a grant from Dell Foundation and equity investment from Acumen Ventures.

LabourNet aims to touch revenue of Rs 70 crore by this financial year end.

`Similarly , Skill Sonics offers high quality training to blue-collar workers in partnership with Swiss Mechanical and Electrical Manufacturing Industriesand the Swiss Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training. "During the pilot stage we primarily placed our trained workers with Swiss companies. Now that we have opened fully as a startup, we are open to placing them in other companies as well," said GP Chandra Kumar, chairman and CEO of SkillSonics.

The company has trained around 2,000 workers so far, and has placed them in companies such as Rieter India, Bobst India and Burckhardt Compression in Pune. "We have received an equity-based funding of Rs 22 crore from NSDC, which will be given over the next four years, and we plan to target revenue of around Rs 8 crore this year," said Kumar.